Should We Stick with Manual Voting Machines?

The longer you are around technology, the easier it becomes to use, the more it becomes ingrained in your lives, that it’s often impossible to imagine there being a better way. But with the recent report on Diebold Election Systems AccuVote-TS voting machines, I have to wonder, isn’t the best way still the old fashioned way? I know e-voting machines will make the pollsters work easier, but will it make them feel better about the outcome? If it is that easy to hack a voting machine, infect it with a virus that spreads by their memory cards and change the outcome, then what are we really saving? And, to take a conspiracy theory to the edge, how hard would it be for an employee to infect each voting machine as it is created, to make sure their party wins.

Recently, Diebold responded to the report in a PDF, and said, basically that the machines they tested were old and had outdated software, that the machines would not be tied to a network to spread the virus and called the report unrealistic and inaccurate, essentially attacking the reviewers trying to deflect the criticism. Well, Ed Felten posted their response to Diebold.

We studied the most recent software version available to us. The version we studied has been used in national elections, and Diebold claimed at the time that it was perfectly secure and could not possibly be subject to the kinds of malicious code injection attacks that our paper and video demonstrate. In short, Diebold made the same kinds of claims about this version — claims that turned out to be wrong — that they are now making about their more recent versions.

We demonstrated these problems on our video, and again in live demos on Fox News and CNN. Common sense says to believe your eyes, not unsubstantiated claims that a technology is secure.

Our paper discusses physical security, election procedures, security tape, and numbered security seals. See, for example, Sections 3.3 and 5.2 of our paper. These sections and others explain why these measures do not prevent the attacks we describe. And once again, Diebold does not assert that they would.

Secure voting equipment and adequate testing would assure accurate voting — if we had them. To our knowledge, every independent third party analysis of the AccuVote-TS has found serious problems, including the Hopkins/Rice report, the SAIC report, the RABA report, the Compuware report, and now our report. Diebold ignores all of these results, and still tries to prevent third-party studies of its system.

If Diebold really believes its latest systems are secure, it should allow third parties like us to evaluate them.

Sounds like a challenge Diebold, are you going to step up to the plate and let them review your secure machine, or are voters like myself just supposed to believe the hype and ignore reports such as this? If you really want to discount what they did, let them test it and have your people watch, it’s win-win for everybody, unless you are afraid of what they will find.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Current Events, Election Fraud, Politics, Technology No Comments » September 2006

Do It Yourself Blog

Chris Pirillo has come up with an interesting idea, a DIY blog anyone can post to, that’s right anyone. All you have to do is signup and post, I assume they check each post to make sure it’s family safe before posting it, but I don’t know that for sure yet.

We’re Doing It - a DIY/GTD group blog that anybody can join at any time. Sign up, post a draft immediately, and never post again for all we care (or continue to post, if you get enough cross-promotional or search engine traffic from the coverage).

So, let’s just see if this “wisdom of crowds” thingy works - and not just for geeks!

“Doing It” isn’t just about technology - we’ve got a few pre-defined categories and we’re ready to expand the list from: General, Home Improvement, Office Productivity, Health and Beauty, Arts and Crafts, Automotive, Lawn and Garden, Gadgets and Gizmos, Photography, Computingm Self Improvement, Social Hacking, as well as Money and Finance.

Feel free join and start contributing immediately! Source: Chris Pirillo

It is definitely worth checking out, as anyone who has been linked to by some of Chris’ sites know, you know you will get some traffic from it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Technology No Comments » August 2006

Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) Passes the House

US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), was passed by a 410 to 15 vote tonight. If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries on those institutions computers or the will loose their federal internet subsidies. And with a margin as big as that one, one would think it would pass the Senate easily as well.

So, if it passes, what does this mean? Will it be applied to blogs like this one, where you create a login and can describe yourself? Or will they apply it loosely and just block the big sites?

From Techcrunch,

An incredibly vague law, DOPA will require schools and libraries to block access to a potentially huge range of sites on the internet. The goal is to protect children from adult predators. Sites that must be blocked include those that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.”

Which would include all blogs, all chat rooms, news sites like News.com, shopping sites like Amazon, all the social sites, not just MySpace, but sites like Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Facebook, but most of the talk has been about sites like MySpace. So, it makes you wonder, do they REALLY know what they are doing? If you’ve read any of my other posts, like the one from Senator Ted Stevens who is Senate President Pro Tempore, and is also Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, then you know how little some of these people know, and these are the people that are deciding the internet’s future right now, and this during an election year.

From Declan McCullagh at Zdnet,

Fitzpatrick’s re-election campaign is one reason why the Republican leadership, which is worried about retaining their slender House majority, arranged a vote on DOPA. Fitzpatrick, who represents a politically moderate district outside of Philadelphia, has found himself in a tight race against challenger Patrick Murphy, an Iraq War veteran and prosecutor.

Technology lobbying groups, which were taken by surprise by this week’s speedy approval of DOPA in the House, are now scrambling to throw up roadblocks to the measure in the Senate. Some expect that the Senate leadership will hold a vote as early as next week. (Libraries also oppose the measure.)

So the time is short for this one. I would say this one will end up in court, as one commenter on the Techcrunch site said,

U.S. Constitution: First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Social Networking site are just peaceful assemblies. This is against our right to free speech.

Just one argument, and a good one, if you can get them to see that it is an assembly, even if it is one person on a computer at a time.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Digg, MySpace, Online Predators, Politics, Security, Social Networks, Technology 2 Comments » July 2006

Chris & Leo Want to Bring Back TechTV

Chris Pirillo and Leo want to bring back TechTV and they need your help! Go here and here if you have any ideas, or software that would make it easy for them to get started online, Chris invisions somewhere everyone could upload their videos, so they could all stay where they are and get the band back together.

For starters, I’m looking for a centralized site where TechTV Alumni could log in, post a video via Flash controls, then have their recordings indexed (tagged? syndicated?) and streamed on-demand. There’s probably an open source app I’m not seeing at the moment, but if any of the TechTV faithful can help… we’re all ears. It could be a TechTV Variety video site - but can the community build it for us to use? We could likely do this through a video portal, but… I think a TechTV community-controlled (or directed) solution is the big win.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Technology, Video Blogging No Comments » July 2006

Standby Buttons to be Outlawed in the UK

This is one of those stories where you just have to shake your head and say, “what”? But in the UK, the government is going to outlaw standby buttons on televisions, video and dvd players the rdeuce the amount of electricity wasted in the homes.

(Pause to make sure it sinks in and allow you to pick yourself up off the floor.)

According to yesterday’s Energy Review, standby facilities use 8 per cent of all domestic electricity.

Lighting, set-top boxes, televisions, chargers, fridges, freezers, washing machines and computers were highlighted as wasteful products that must be redesigned to save power.

Businesses will have to phase out or reduce drastically the energy used by computers, printers and photocopiers left on standby. Source: TimesOnline via Realtechnews

Seriously, what are they thinking? Standby was created to save electricity, do they think that people will all of a sudden start turning everything off? The only way that will happen is if the extra costs associated with not having a standy mode increase their electric bill enough to matter. I don’t know what else to say, it’s truly unbelievable that someone could think that this will help.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Energy, Rambling, Technology No Comments » July 2006